Yiddish, poetry, science, medicine, vegetarian Indian food, and the Ineffable. In no particular order.

4/19/07

Earlobes

On Leviticus 14:14, Rashi (or the Rashi found in many chumoshim my chumesh) uses a word קנארפעל knarfel to gloss תנוך אוזן earlobe. I have no idea what kind of word this is. I don't think it's Yiddish, unless it's a weird rhoticizing way of spelling קנאפל knafl heel ("heel of the ear"?). If anyone knows, that would make me less mystified, and would save me the effort I'm currently expending in trying to look it up. (Ideally I would find a reliable critical edition of Rashi which includes the "Yiddish" glosses, but I don't know where that would be.)

Update: The lobe thickens. I followed S.'s advice and just spent way too much time browsing Google Books (thanks for nothing!). Jerold Frakes' Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750 (see page 1 in Google Books) includes a few pages on the Yiddish and Tsarfatic glosses found in Rashi. Leviticus 14:14, and knarfel, are not among them. I guess then that whatever manuscript my bal-chumesh was working from either (a) had a later addition of this super-gloss, or (b) the publisher just stuck it in. I have yet to look at the printed Rashi manuscripts available through JNUL.